In this new episode of our podcast Value from AI, host Lien Michiels, Ph.D. student and Data Scientist at Froomle, speaks with Özlem Özgöbek. Özlem is an Associate Professor at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), in the Department of Computer Science. 

They deep dive into Özlem's research in news recommendations and fake news detection, a hot topic within the news and media industry. 

These are some of the topics that Lien and Özlem touch base in the interview:

Fake news detection

Fake news has been a worrying topic for the last 10 years, and the rise of social media has only accelerated these concerns.. Despite the continuous work towards early detection, it’s true that the negative impact of fake news can be immediate and affect thousands of people within minutes. Özlem discusses how traditional media organizations can tackle fake news in a successful manner.

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News recommendations 

News recommendations have become a key player in newsrooms all around the world. Özlem and Lien talk about the biggest challenges nowadays and the benefits from implementing a recommender system. 

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INRA (International Workshop on News Recommendation and Analytics)

The 10th International Workshop on News Recommendation and Analytics (INRA 2022 in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2022) invites scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss topics related to news recommendation, including but not limited to technical, societal, and ethical aspects. On top of that, they have a challenge called NewsImage, that Özlem explains in detail in the interview. 

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Bias & Privacy

What are the greatest biases in RecSys currently? Data privacy and their control is another topic that the newsrooms have been struggling with, especially in Europe, with GDPR compliance. Lien and Özlem talk about the do’s and don’t’s of data privacy and how much companies can actually know about a person by only accepting cookies. 

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Women in RecSys

What is the current gender balance in Özlem’s perspectives and what kind of activities are organized in order to improve that balance? 

Women in RecSys is a social movement of activities created a few years ago with the purpose of including women into the RecSys community and supporting their work. Özlem shares with us the activities they organize every year and the success of the last edition at the RecSys Conference in Seattle. 

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About Özlem

Özlem Özgöbek is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in the department of Computer Science. After living in Turkey, she decided to move to Norway where she pursued her Ph.D research and now she is teaching Recommender Systems and keeps investigating the fake news detection. 

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Mentioned resources:

• INRA: https://research.idi.ntnu.no/NewsTech/INRA/
• NewsImages: https://multimediaeval.github.io/editions/2022/tasks/newsimages/
• NewsImages joint paper: “NewsImages: addressing the depiction gap with an online news dataset for text-image rematching.", Lommatzsch, Andreas, et al., Proceedings of the 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference. 2022.
• Women in Recsys: https://recsys.acm.org/recsys22/women-in-recsys/